On CentOS at least, date returns a boolean for the common date string formats, including YYYY-MM-DD. In the sample output, you can see various invalid dates returning 0 whereas a simple regex check would return 1 for the invalid dates.

Quick and easy way of validating a date format of yyyy-mm-dd and returning a boolean, the regex can easily be upgraded to handle "in betweens" for mm dd or to validate other types of strings, ex. ip address.

Boolean output could easily be piped into a condition for a more complete one-liner.